Posted on 05/30/2004 12:05:27 PM PDT by risk
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1117032/posts - “When I Left, We Were Winning” by Mackubin Thomas Owens
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/829 - A Better War : The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999) by Lewis Sorley
http://www.jbs.org/visitor/focus/vietnam/no_win/vietnam_falls.htm - Vietnam Falls, by Susan Huck
My tribute to Vietnam Vets with a twist: drop by the thread with suggestions on how to avoid the mistakes we made in the 1960s and 1970s. Many were political. What are we doing differently today as we try to fight a war "overseas" that many Americans think is "optional?"
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NEVER FORGET
How to avoid America's mistakes of the 60's & 70's in a new Time of War, in a new Century with an Enemy that is now just around the corner and up your street =
KNOW and UNDERSTAND, finally, that the following were always on the side of our Terrorist Enemies against US, like Communist Leader HO CHI MINH during the Vietnam War, and nothing has changed since:
-JOHN KERRY
-BILL CLINTON
-HILLLARY RODHAM
-WALTER CRONKITE
Only now it's now OUR own Freedom that's at stake.
NEVER FORGET
.
I do disagree very much with the people who say that returning Viet Nam vets were not welcomed with open arms. In my communities they were viewed as heroes.
.
NEVER FORGET
Our Hero American Soldiers...
fighting for...
the Freedom of others,
those that train them...
in their Freedom Mission...
and those who wait for them...
to come home...
or not...
are...
.........HOLY........!!!
See:
MEL's -PASSION- sparked by -WE WERE SOLDIERS-
http://www.TheAlamoFILM.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=39081
Signed://"ALOHA RONNIE" Guyer / Veteran "WE WERE SOLDIERS" Battle of IA DRANG-1965
http://www.lzxray.com/guyer_set1.htm
(Photos)
http://www.lzxray.com/guyer_collection.htm
(Photos)
Contributing Author - 'MODERN DAY HEROES: In Defense ofAmerica'
http://www.ModernDayHeroes.com
NEVER FORGET
-JOHN KERRY
-BILL CLINTON
-HILLLARY RODHAM
-WALTER CRONKITE
Ronnie, what gives those people their evil power?
Given the mysteries surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and the consistent minimizing of the escalation requirements at the beginning of the Vietnam war, I think we may have to condede that American hawks should be more careful when they explain why we need to take us into war.
In a society predicated on "truth" can we ever explain why preemptive or overseas wars of limited defense have to be fought?
I think on 9/12/2001 the American people would have accepted our decision to take the war on terror into Iraq, even if they had been told that we were going in to dismantle WMD design capacity and take down just one link in the WMD axis. They would have been prepared for a bloody occupation. They would have accepted what we have done as inevitable -- if they had been told the facts.
I think the same goes for the Vietnam war. If Americans had been told why we needed to take the Cold War to a new level, and step up the attrition in SE Asia, Americans would have accepted it. Moreover, if we had refused to limit our area of operation to Vietnam, instead pursuing Viet Cong troops and their suppliers wherever we could have (besides China itself), Americans would have supported it.
It may be that the lies and the mismanagement (i.e. artificial limiation of war to meaningless international borders) provides the Kerrys and the Clintons and the Cronkites with their power. Aren't we doing this again? I think President Bush has begun to offer a more realistic view of our world war on terrorism, but has he continued to allow the State Department to shaft our troops with artificial limits and restraints?
Let's hope we take the motivation of these soulless Americans away. Let's fight our wars in the open from now on. Let's force the elites from all political viewpoints to stop playing games with our security and our troops. Otherwise the stories Burkett and Whitley describe in Stolen Valor will be told again about the war on terror...
B.G. Burkett, in over ten years of research in the National Archives, filing hundreds of requests for military documents under the Freedom of Information Act., uncovered a massive distortion of history, a distortion that has cost the U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars. Mr. Burkett's work has toppled national political leaders and put criminals in jail.
--From the summary of Stolen Valor How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History by B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley
The Vietnam war was the longest in our nation's history.
1st American advisor was killed on June 08, 1956,
and the last casualties in connection with the war occurred on May 15, 1975, during the Mayaquez incident. Approximately 2.7 million Americans served in the war zone; 300,000 were wounded and approximately 75,000 permanently disabled. Officially there are still 1,991 Americans unaccounted for from SE Asia.
Vietnam was a savage, in your face war where death could and did strike from anywhere with absolutely no warning. The brave young men and women who fought that war paid an awful price of blood, pain and suffering. As it is said: "ALL GAVE SOME ... SOME GAVE ALL"
The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield. No American force in ANY other conflict fought with more determination or sheer courage than the Vietnam Veteran. For the first time in our history America sent it's young men and women into a war run by inept politicians who had no grasp of military strategies and no moral will to win. They were led by "top brass" who were concerned mainly with furthering their own careers, most neither understood the nature of the war nor had a clue about the impossible mission with which they'd tasked their soldiers. And the war was reported by a self serving Media who penned stories filled with inaccuracies, deliberate omissions, biased presentations and blatant distorted interpretations because they were more interested in a story than the truth! It can be debated that we should never have fought that war. It can also be argued that the young Americans who fought so courageously, never losing a single major battle, helped in a huge way to WIN THE COLD WAR.
The enemy is inside, as Ronnie repeats.
ping
About the Advisers
[SNIP]
Morton H. Halperin
[SNIP]
Anthony Lake
[SNIP]
Robert McNamara
[SNIP]
Joe Wilson
.
Them, them, ....nail THEM.
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How do these people get their power, Ronnie? Why do the American people follow them?
.
Our Enemies Within control the Major News Media ...especially TV ...and have ever since the Vietnam War.
Our Enemies Within have also controlled the Democrat Party ever since the Vietnam War.
By ommitting the reporting of our Enemies Within's own worst misbehaviors against US ..the People just don't get it.
Over 1.5 Million poor S.E. Asian Free Souls lost their lives at the hands of invading Communist Bullies after the Fall of Saigon.
And now these same Enemies Within want Bagdhad to fall over to Terrorists who have already attacked US at home Big Time.
The Enemy is now Within...
and always has been.
It seems we're fighting an internal battle for the future of our republic, as well as one with external opponents.
As a footnote: Soviet and Chinese propaganda of the past 50 years continues to have a global impact. It appears either to have a long half-life, or to have continued support. But from whom?
That's a complex issue, and I don't have any easy answers. I think one line of differentiation is whether dissent involves cooperating with foreign enemy powers. However such cooperation can be conscious or unintentional, which is an important distinction. I think another issue would be the purpose of the dissent--whether it really is principled or whether it's merely using the guise of dissent to promote domestic violence (cf. the McCarran Internal Security Act Sec. 22 F).
On the footnote about Soviet and Chinese propaganda, my sense is that much propaganda has been perpetuated through former State Department personnel who followed up their diplomatic careers by consulting for the State Department via think tanks like the CFR, going into teaching at sympathetic colleges, being quoted as "experts" by the liberal press, etc. A case study would be the post-diplomatic careers of the "China Hands" McCarthy drew attention to. For instance:
He was (1938–50) director of the Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins. In 1950 he was accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy of being the Soviet Union’s top espionage agent in the United States, but subsequent investigation cleared him of the charges. In 1952, Lattimore was indicted for perjury on seven counts by a federal grand jury on the charge that he had lied when he told a Senate internal security subcommittee earlier in 1952 that he had not promoted Communism and Communist interests; by 1955 all charges against him had been dismissed. He was lecturer in history at Johns Hopkins until 1963. From 1963–70 he was professor of Chinese studies at Leeds Univ., England.
Lattimore looks like an interesting place to start searching for interesting activity. From namebase.org, I found this somewhat unsympathetic piece which complains about right-wing attacks on sources of communist infiltration in America as being misplaced. He mentions Lattimore: Excerpts from a CFR Archivist: Wormser's Foundations is mentioned, as well as Lattimore.
I wonder if it's a tendency toward utopianism that has gotten us into trouble with the way we fight wars since 1945? The Greatest Generation really put a lot of hope in the U.N., for example. Most of us agree that was misplaced...
I agree that's a big part of it, and it relates to the utopianism you mention later in your post. I think you can trace what I'd call a "naive utopian" movement back through the League of Nations to some turn-of-the-century philanthropic organizations (Rockefellers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, etc.). Often the financiers of these organizations were relatively moral people who had good intentions but, due to a secular humanist belief system which overestimated human potential, were blind to how the darker side of human nature can corrupt the best of intentions. This was a tendency in much 19th-century thought, and though such naive optimism was dashed with cold water by World War I, the tendency lingered among those who wished to ignore Stalin's abuses in the hope that a de-Stalinized form of Communism was feasible, etc., leading to a revived utopianism with the UN. I think part of this was also a psychological defense mechanism motivated by a desire to avoid facing the human condition squarely and especially to avoid dealing with the issues raised by the advent of nuclear war. Nobody wanted nuclear war; some were willing to do anything to avoid it, including turning a blind eye to the reality of the Soviet threat.
Thanks for the links on Lattimore; I'll check that out. Another source on him which is written from a left-wing perspective but can still be read critically for useful information is Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China. For a conservative rebuttal to Newman's defense of Lattimore, see Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy : Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, esp. 120-128.
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